Contents

1 Release 8 highlights
1.1 Shared calendar and delegated task management
1.2 Advanced team collaboration and group sharing
1.3 Advanced marketing segmentation wizard
1.4 Contact networking
1.5 Analytics_v4-5
2 Additional enhancements
2.1 Expanded web services and integration
2.2 Expanded data export and import
2.3 Opportunity audit trail
2.4 Parent-child accounts
2.5 Account and contact team roles
2.6 Contact role on account
2.7 Contact-centric offline synchronisation
3 New required client downloads
3.1 Import remapping required
4 Additional notes
5 How do you and your end-users get training on these new features?

1 Release 8 highlights

1.1 Shared calendar and delegated task management

In today’s increasingly complex and competitive business environments, effective team collaboration is critical in driving revenue and delivering superior customer service. Release 8 will provide advanced calendaring tools to enhance team collaboration and improve the co-ordination of team resources. For example, shared calendaring will allow users to view other users’ calendars, schedule joint appointments with multiple users and customer contacts, check availability of invited users and send e-mail notifications to invitees. The group calendaring tool allows users to view their team’s calendars in a single consolidated view. This enables users to schedule team meetings at a glance and manage workload distribution across the team. Task management enhancements give users access to a list of all tasks owned by members of their team so that team members can make sure that no customer commitment goes unfulfilled. Delegated task management allows users to track tasks that they have assigned to others through to completion.

Shared calendar and team task management enhancements include the ability to share calendars with team members, manage tasks across a team, consolidate group calendar views, check availability and send activity e-mail notifications.

A calendar sharing privilege can be set in the user, group and role management area of administration to enable calendar sharing.
Users can share their calendar and manage other calendar preferences from the calendar setup area—available from any calendar page.
When shared, users can view another user’s personal calendar and check their availability when scheduling appointments.
To view another user’s shared calendar, simply select the user drop down on the user calendar view.
When checking availability of invited users, mouse over their appointments to see additional appointment details.
The group calendar views give instant visibility into the availability for an entire team in a single, consolidated calendar.
Send e-mail updates and notifications to anyone invited to an appointment or associated with a task by clicking the send e-mail button on any task or  appointment. 
Manage tasks as a team and make sure nothing falls through the cracks using the group tasks tab. View all tasks owned by any member of the team and work collaboratively to ensure that your customer commitments are being appropriately followed up.
Limit access to sensitive appointment information on an appointment-by-appointment basis by checking the private checkbox on the appointment detail. Details for private appointments will only be visible to those invited to the appointment.
Delegated task lists allow you to track all the tasks which you have assigned to others through to closure. To access delegated task lists, click the view all link under the open tasks area on the OnDemand homepage and user calendar page and select any of the pre-configured delegated task lists.
A new Analytics_v4-5 shared activities subject area enables real-time insight into shared activities. See the Analytics_v4-5 section for more information.

1.2 Advanced team collaboration and group sharing

In many companies, teams or groups have shared responsibility for customers in specific segments, industries, and/or geographies. In Release 8, Contact Central OnDemand will enable seamless group-based sharing to facilitate more efficient collaboration among team members. All members automatically share their teams' accounts, contacts, and opportunities. Groups also share a consolidated team calendar to facilitate better collaboration. All changes to group membership are automatically reflected in the sharing of accounts, contacts, opportunities, and calendars; new team members immediately gain access to all team records just by adding them to the group.

The group sharing feature is a powerful, easy to administer tool. Enhancements to efficiently administer groups include:

A group administration page allows the association of users to a group. By default, this allows all members within a group to see another member’s calendar.
When the default group assignment checkbox is enabled in the company profile, any sales team records assigned to an owner will be associated to their respective group automatically. If an owner changes, the group association will automatically update. A sales team exists for accounts (and associated access to contacts and opportunities), Contacts and opportunities. The opportunities sales team is not currently exposed in the user interface.
All users within a group assigned to a sales team will have full access to any associated records regardless of their role access. In other words, each member in the owner group is an owner of the record.

Group sharing is recommended when there are more than 100 users within a hierarchy. Manager visibility may be turned-off if you choose to use group sharing only. Analytics_v4-5 will support either manager visibility, as it does today, or sales team sharing.

1.3 Advanced marketing segmentation wizard

Targeting the right message to the right customer is the centrepiece of effective marketing. Release 8 will help you dramatically increase your marketing return on investment (ROI) with advanced segmentation capabilities. Your marketing team can easily perform multidimensional segmentation to generate contact lists segmented by any combination of the account, contact, opportunity and service request information you track in Contact Central OnDemand. Your marketers can attach these contact lists to marketing campaigns so that the right individuals receive the right offers from your company.

The key features to marketing segmentation include:

Users define multi-dimensional segments using an easy-to-use, Microsoft Excel-based tool.
Segments can be automatically uploaded to campaigns in Contact Central OnDemand.
The usage of Microsoft Excel to generate target lists allows easy distribution and compatibility with third parties.
Microsoft Excel can be leveraged for sophisticated data manipulation.

1.4 Contact networking

Contact networks based on social and business relationships can influence business decisions and uncover new revenue opportunities. Release 8 will enable your users to track their contact networks by capturing key relationships between contacts. For example, contact networks may identify relationships among former colleagues, a lawyer and his clients, alumni from the same college, or even golfing buddies. Your sales people will take advantage of these contact networks to influence existing business and uncover new opportunities.

Enhancements to support contact networking include:

A new contact relationships related item on the contact detail page where bi-directional relationships are defined.
Customisable relationship fields are used to define relationships between contacts.
An associated contact relationships Analytics_v4-5 subject area enables real-time insight into contact networks. See the Analytics_v4-5 section for more information.

Please note that this feature is available only in Contact Central OnDemand’s industry editions.

1.5 Analytics_v4-5

A customer relationship management (CRM) solution is as powerful as the actionable insight it provides. Release 8 extends OnDemand’s already rich analytical business intelligence capabilities with additional insight achieved from three new OnDemand features: Advanced team collaboration and group sharing, shared calendaring, and contact networking.

          Advanced team collaboration and group sharing

When operating in the group sharing model, Release 8 provides the option for a user to see all records where they are a team member in the operational application regardless of record owner. Team visibility provides the ability to measure and monitor the performance of a cross-functional team, allowing increased team collaboration and team effectiveness among team and group members. Group sharing is supported on activities, accounts and contacts. 

Shared calendaring and delegated tasks

Release 8 extends new shared calendaring and task management solutions by offering complementary analytical and reporting insight. A new shared activities subject area provides real-time reporting for all activities appearing within a user’s shared calendar. These activities include those the user owns, those the user is invited to, those that have been shared with the user, or those that the user has delegated to another individual. Access to the team’s calendar and tasks within Analytics_v4-5 provides powerful management capabilities that promote collaboration and team productivity. 

Contact networking

A new contact relationships subject area enables real-time insight into contact networks. The subject area supports analysis of any contact’s network of related contacts, identifies key influencers common across a set of contacts, and highlights trends in network relationships. This analysis provides the insight needed to identify key players within one or more contact networks and to focus attention accordingly. The contact relationship subject area reports on key fields associated with a contact relationship, such as the relationship itself (e.g. Lawyer for), the reverse relationship (eg Client of), the relationship description, status, start date and end date.

Additional Analytics_v4-5 enhancements include:

2 Additional enhancements

2.1 Expanded web services and integration

Release 8 will continue to expand the object coverage of the OnDemand web services application programming interface (API) enabling companies to integrate custom and third-party application with OnDemand using web services standards. Newly exposed objects include activity, opportunity product, territory, contact team, user group and more. Please refer to the API guide for complete details.

2.2 Expanded data export and import

The export wizard has been expanded to include account contacts, account competitors, account partners, account addresses, contact teams, contact addresses, service request audit trails, and shared calendar changes.
The import wizard has been changed to support the many relationships between tasks and users, tasks and contacts, appointments and users, and appointments and contacts.

2.3 Opportunity audit trail

Users can now track changes to opportunities with a new audit trail feature. This feature provides the ability to track the user who made the change, the date the change was made, the old value and the new value. Changes made in the online and offline clients as well as those made via personal information manager (PIM) Sync, Outlook e-mail integration, web services, and import are all captured as changes.

2.4 Parent-child accounts

Users can track account hierarchies using the new sub-accounts related item list on the account detail page. This feature allows users to easily see all accounts associated with the parent.

2.5 Account and contact team roles

Users can now track the unique roles that each member of the sales team plays at each customer. Team roles are configurable by the company administrator.

2.6 Contact role on account

Users can now track the role of each contact at a particular account. Contact roles are configurable by the company administrator.

2.7 Contact-centric offline synchronisation

Users now have the option to specify whether synchronisation between the online application and the offline client are account-based or contact-based. Contact-based downloads provide increased flexibility to support contact-based selling and servicing models. Additionally, Contact Central OnDemand Life Sciences Edition and Contact Central OnDemand Financial Services Edition customers can access the contact relationships related list in the offline application when doing contact-based downloads.

3 New required client downloads

A new Contact Central Offline OnDemand client will be required. The new client will automatically download after the last upload.

3.1 Import remapping required

Please be advised that if you have existing import map files that map the fields listed below, you will need to re-map those fields and save the newly created map file.

Opportunity

Account External Id 
Owner Alias External Id

Service request   

Account External Id 
Contact External Id 
Owner External Id

Tasks & appointments 

Account External Id 
Campaign External Id 
Contact External Id 
Lead External Id 
Opportunity External Id 
Owner External Id 
Service Request External Id

4 Additional notes 

A new delegated by field has been added to the default task layout.
Three new pre-defined lists have been added to the activities list: delegated tasks – completed, delegated tasks – open, and delegated tasks – overdue.
Status and type fields in opportunity product revenue, account revenue, and contact revenue related items have been renamed to product status and product type. The remaining status and type fields refer to revenue.
Account revenue and contact revenue values no longer appear in the forecast type pick list under forecasting for non-Life Sciences customers.
Industry-specific fields for Life Sciences, Financial Services, Automotive, and High-Tech are now available in assignment manager.
A created by field has been added to appointments and tasks. To use this field, it must be exposed on the appointment or task layouts for each role who wishes to use it.
A new contact relationships Analytics_v4-5 subject area is visible to all users with access to Answers OnDemand. The corresponding online feature is only available to purchasers of the Contact Central OnDemand’s industry editions.  

Contact Central OnDemand Life Sciences Edition changes:

The my opportunities section is no longer displayed in account and contact-based forecasts. 
The opportunity pipeline column is now empty on account and contact-based forecasts.

How do you and your end-users get training on these new features?

 Live training, recorded web seminars and built-in tutorials for these new enhancements are included free of charge. Updated online Help will also soon be available.

A training presentation for these new enhancements is available from the link below. The online help and tutorials will be updated accordingly with Release 8.

Note

This presentation may take several minutes to download due to its large file size. You will need to have Microsoft PowerPoint or Microsoft PowerPoint Viewer installed to access this presentation. This can be downloaded here.

For the latest availability of training on this new release, just contact Contact Central OnDemand Customer Care. New training courses are coming shortly.

We will keep you up-to-date with further news as it becomes available. As always, please contact Customer Care with any questions at:

UK: 0800 3890864
International: + 44 (0) 113 246 8694

For further information or to speak to a member of our team please click here